The stages are imaginatively designed gauntlets filled with impossible, floating architecture and tentacle monsters that provide a good excuse to get a handle on Splatoon 2’s different guns and movement systems before competing against real players, but the challenges are limited and too similar from level to level to be worth much for their own sake. Each level offers variations on a common theme, highlighting tactics for taking down enemies with a wide array of weapons and learning the intricacies of navigating environments as both squid and human through simple puzzles. The single-player mode is, like before, a cursory diversion. Once again, the player creates a squid/human hybrid, hangs out in a postdiluvian, Superflat-inflected version of a downtown Tokyo street, throws millions of liters of paint at everything around her, and uses the cash earned in never-ending turf wars to buy new clothes and weapons that make her both better at fighting and, more importantly, increasingly stylish when in human form. More a rehash than anything new, Splatoon 2 consists almost entirely of slightly better-looking iterations of what’s come before. If a description of what makes it so great sounds familiar, though, it’s because it’s a retread of pretty much the exact same formula that made its 2015 predecessor a great game, too. Splatoon 2 is, at its core, a beautifully made game. There’s the subversive thrill of a shooter replicating the excitement of its genre peers by swapping headshots for paint drenching, channeling the primal joys of violent combat into coloring book battles that gain rather than lose power in being so innocuous. There’s the simple push and pull of a game whose primary multiplayer mode makes simply coloring in swathes of the level as important as taking down enemy players. There’s the instant burst of pleasurable feedback that comes from sloshing paint-color, sound, and minute controller rumble-onto walls, ground or enemy, repeated thousands of times per match. It’s hard to do with all the noise, visual and otherwise, but if you slow down a bit and consider the component parts of any few seconds of Splatoon 2, it shows an extraordinary level of craft. The sounds of splashing paint are carried on the back of frantic pop songs sung by computerized chipmunk voices speaking an invented language. Everything is rendered loudly, battle arenas are bathed in rich purples and blues, neon greens and oranges. The trigger that fires paint from various guns, brushes and buckets is held down almost constantly so as to shoot at not just opposing players, but also any surface not already covered in the appropriate color. Switching between being a squid, swimming and flopping through a pool of ink, and its squat, cartoon human form, happens with a single button push. Splatoon 2 moves quickly and there’s always a lot going on.

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